How Are You Investing Your Energy?

I remember when I first encountered the "fear versus love" dichotomy popularized by A Course in Miracles. The idea that fear blocked love, and that I could make choices out of either fear or love, really affected me and how I lived my life. When making decisions or witnessing my behavior, I would ask myself: "Am I motivated by fear or by love?" Doing my best to consciously choose love was transformative and empowering.

Recently I have come across another such powerful axiom put forth in the work of Harvey Grady. If we understand that we operate in one of two modes, reactive or creative, we can understand a lot about how we invest our energy.

If we are reactive we operate safely within our comfort zone and stay stuck in a rut, operating on auto-pilot. We do this by choice. It is our right to stay stuck in a rut of repetitive existence if we want to. Staying stuck in that rut requires very little investment of energy, other than the creative energy that was required to get there in the first place.

Once in the rut, you can stay in a reactive mode without making much further investment of energy. Eventually, if very little energy is invested, you will run yourself down to a point of restriction where you will seek something better. At that point you may be motivated to become creative once again.

When we make a creative choice we must invest our energy, our life force, in a new creative expression. Creativity involves conscious, intentional action. It also involves risk. We cannot be truly creative and evolutionary simply by "being good" or "following the rules." True creativity always involves some measure of stepping outside of our comfort zone, shaking things up, disturbing our status quo. It involves risk, which often invokes the experience of fear.  

But even though fear can get activated by true creativity, this does not mean creativity is antithesis to love (remembering the fear/love dichotomy). It means that through creativity we invoke our fears, bring them into conscious awareness, overcome them, and awaken a greater capacity to love.